Better Late Than Never... (Part One)

I hated reading when I was a kid.  I’m referring to the span of time that for most men that extends from birth to the early twenties.  You can’t blame it on my parents.  My mother was a school teacher and knocked out at least a novel a week and my dad would spend his evenings in a book-lined den reading his biographies and newspapers.  They tried their best, plying me with Hardy Boys books, Sports Illustrated and even MAD Magazine.  If it was more than a paragraph, I’d put it down.  Maybe it was some rebellion to my parents’ efforts or maybe I was just lazy.  Probably the latter.  In my defense, I wasn’t a very good reader and I’m still not.  I read really slowly and I have to stop myself from mouthing the words while I read silently; a strict no-no in every speed-reading manual. 

I knew it was important, but I never stopped seeking a hack (we didn’t have that term then) or way around the hard part.  For about twenty years, I prided myself in just that.  I got through high school and undergraduate studies by mostly reading chapter summaries, Cliff’s Notes, watching the movie, and generally winging it.  I thought I was getting away with something.  It wasn’t until my senior year of college, when my dad was driving me home from school that something happened.  We were stuck behind a car with the curious bumper sticker that asked the question “Who is John Galt?” 

“Now, what is that supposed to mean?” I asked my dad.

“Ah, now that is a true intellectual” he said.

I sat there for a minute, not wanting to take the bait, but I took it.

“That’s great Dad, but what does it mean?”

“Well, I can’t tell you.  It’s from a book.”

“What book?” (the tractor beam starts the pull).

“Atlas Shrugged.”

“Atlas, what?”

“Shrugged” and he shrugged his shoulders as the light turned green.

“Atlas Shrugged?  What kind of book title is that?”

“It was written by Ayn Rand.”

“So, who is John Galt?”

“Well, I can’t tell you.  You have to read the book.”

“Seriously?”

He didn’t reply.  In fact, he changed the subject.  No attempt to convince me to read.  That was it.  He mentioned that it was on the shelf at home if I wanted to find it and then he just turned up the radio.  This just about drove me crazy.  When I attempted to broach the subject later, he wouldn’t answer my questions.  When we finally got home, I waited until he had gone to the store – there was no way he was going to see me looking through his books.  It took a while to find it, stuck between Adam Smith and Thomas Edison.  A battered paperback with yellowed pages, and… eleven hundred pages.  Oh, no.  No, no, no.  I’m not going for this one.  I put it back.

My mom was cooking dinner when I dropped it on her.

“Who is John Galt?”

She slowly turned from the kitchen sink, drying her hands with a curious smile and a tilted head, but said nothing.

I repeated the question, “Who is, or was John Galt?”

“Why do you ask?”

What the hell?  This was all a déjà vu moment from the time when the ten-year-old me had stood in the same spot and dropped the “what does fuck mean” question to her.  She had dropped the plate she was washing into the sink.  Slowly turning around and drying her hands on her apron, she had simply said “why do you ask?”

I told her the story of the bumper sticker, leaving out the part about my dad insisting that I read a book.  Right on cue, she merely said

“Well, you would need to read Ayn Rand to answer that” and when back to preparing dinner.

Did they rehearse this or something?  I was so annoyed that I went out and didn’t mention it again – and neither did they.   It wasn’t until the end of the break, when I was packing to go back to school (raiding their pantry), that I had my moment.  I was taking my old beater of a car back to school (it had been in the shop) so they wouldn’t see what I packed.  Each time that I came in and out with armfuls of stuff, I had to pass that den.  On the last time to the car, I looked both ways for my parents.  The coast was clear.  I put down my bag and went in.  Facing the book on the shelf, I looked at it for a minute and grabbed it and put it in the bag.

When I finally got up to school I practically couldn’t stand it.  Leaving my luggage all over the floor, I sat down on the couch to read “Who is John Galt?” in the opening line.  I scanned the page for some sort of explanation, and then the next, and the next and found myself scanning hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of pages for the answer.  Nothing.  It was at this moment that my hippie roommate walked in, glanced at the title and asked “Who is John Galt?” as he went into his room and shut the door.  Infuriating.  I was going to have to read the damned book.

That book changed my life.  Now I know what you might be thinking.  Maybe you don’t like Ayn Rand or her philosophy.  Maybe you don’t think she’s that great of a writer.  That is not the point here.  This is how I began reading.  That damned book took me almost year to read.  The transformation wasn’t immediate.  It was only my pigheadedness that kept me going.  Well, that and the apparent conspiracy of all Ayn Rand fans to withhold the identity of John Galt.  Though my opinions aren’t what they were at twenty-one, I was persuaded by Ms. Rand and will never quite see the world in the same way.  Again, this is not the point.  After this (I had graduated by then), I found a list: “The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written.”  I think it was from an ad for the Easton Press trying to sell me leather bound books that I could not afford.  It was also about this time that I discovered books-on-tape.  I know, “he said tape.”  Very funny, but it was 1991.  I started double-timing the list; reading at night and listening to another book in the car for my one hour commute each way to work.  By the time I got married in 1996, I had vanquished the list and moved onto “The Greatest Books of the 20th Century,” “The Greatest Science Fiction of All Time,” and “Books That Changed the World.”  Thanks Easton Press.  I will say that I eventually did start buying their books when I finally had a positive bank balance.  After I would read the library version or listen to the tape and I felt that I could not live without it, I would buy the leather bound version.  Unfortunately for my new wife, this meant most of them.  We didn’t have room for all the books in our first home and it wasn’t until we built our next house in 2002 that I finally had bookshelves.  Somewhere during these years, I had also developed an old bookstore fetish and the crusty old books lined every surface.

It wasn’t a genre thing either.  It was biography, vampires, and history.  It was Don Quixote, Dune, and Benjamin Franklin.  Sitting next to my Stephen Hawking was the Tao Te Ching.  My poor wife (God bless her) would try in vain to organize them, but it was no good.  Much of them simply stayed in boxes in our crawl space but I would just keep pulling them back out to look something up. Somewhere in there I had decided that it was cool to have multiple versions of the same book and cross reference the different versions.  I would have five bibles arranged across my desk so that I could “compare” them.  I was amazed by the differences.  The infection had metastasized. 

Through all this, I had never really thought of actually writing myself until Jeff died….

(to be continued….)